Adidas Archive

100 years ago the brothers Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler made their first pair of sports shoes. Hundreds of groundbreaking designs, epic moments, and star-studded collabs later, this book presents the first visual review of the Adidas shoe through more than 350 models, including never-before-seen prototypes and one-of-a-kind originals.

To further develop and tailor his products to athletes’ specific needs, Dassler asked them to return their worn footwear when no longer needed, with each shoes eventually ending up in his attic. To this day the tradition lives on, with many athletes returning their shoes to adidas, oftentimes as a thank you after winning a title or breaking a world record. This collection now makes up the "adidas archive", one of the largest archives of any sports goods manufacturer in the world, which photographers Christian Habermeier and Sebastian Jäger have been visually documenting in extreme detail for years.

Shot using the highest reproduction techniques, these images reveal the fine details as much as they do the stains, the tears, the repair tape, the grass smudges, and the faded autographs. It’s all here, unmanipulated and captured in extremely high resolution, along with the personal stories of each individual wearer. The shoes worn by West Germany’s football team during its “miraculous” 1954 World Cup win appear, as do those worn by Kathrine Switzer when she ran the Boston Marathon in 1967, before women were officially allowed to compete. There are custom models for stars from Madonna to Lionel Messi, collabs with the likes of Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Raf Simons, Stella McCartney, Parley for the Oceans or Yohji Yamamoto, and a documentation of the brand’s trailblazing techniques and materials, like its pioneering use of plastic waste that is intercepted from beaches and coastal communities.

The art book is accompanied by a foreword by designer Jacques Chassaing and expert texts. Each image picture tells us the why and the how, and conveys the driving ethos behind adidas. What you will discover goes beyond mere design. In the end, these are just shoes, worn out by their users who have loved them — but they are also first-hand witnesses of sports, design, and cultural history, from the Dassler brother's humble beginnings, the founding of adidas, and even up until today.

Concept & Photography By
Christian Habermeier has been working as a photographer and designer since 1989. He taught communication design and has taught photography and digital illustration from 2000 to 2006. His own projects span from Cuba, Kenya, Nepal, India, Switzerland, to Hong Kong. In 2000 he founded studio waldeck photographers and was able to realize his long cherished vision of a CO2-neutral studio in 2013.

Sebastian Jäger studied design at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg, focusing on moving images and photography, where he met former lecturer Christian Habermeier in 2005. Their joint company studio waldeck photographers serves customers from industry and the cultural sector. Since 2011, they have been creating a visual record of the holdings of the historical adidas archive.